Digitization of industries continues at an inexorable pace. Everyone in IT is either contemplating embarking on the digitization journey or is worried about how software will disrupt them on their whole industry. Agile development and Continuous Delivery are more than just buzzwords. In fact, enterprises are "cobbling" together Continuous Delivery Pipelines to stake their own claim on "practicing CD".

Since the launch of CD pipeline for Cisco IT in 2014, we realized we are missing a critical piece: channelization of loads of data generated each second from the CD tool-chain. While business was expecting greater velocity from the Continuous Delivery Process, it was becoming increasingly cumbersome for distributed development teams to track their software in CD pipeline. There was no feedback loop from CD platforms back to individual teams.

To move quickly, team members need information from DevOps tools also from each other. For example, the build tool Jenkins automatically reports whether a build succeeded or failed.

Before, developers received status updates from DevOps tools via email. But email alerts delayed the pipeline. Suppose an engineer in Bangalore pushes code to Jenkins before going to sleep at 11:00 p.m. Meanwhile, it’s the middle of the workday in San Jose, California. What if California engineers could find out the instant that DevOps tools completed a task— without having to constantly check email? Then we’d have follow-the-sun development, speeding up new feature introduction. What was required was a one stop shop to go to see the tool-chain data, send messages, and hold group meetings.

We quickly built a simple, powerful solution by integrating our tool-chain with Cisco Spark, using the Spark API. Cisco Spark is a cloud service that provides an unlimited number of virtual rooms for messaging, meeting, and calling. Now our DevOps tools also push status notifications into the Spark room. Engineers receive a Spark notification on all of their devices whenever a new message arrives—either from a human or a DevOps tool. The tools we’ve integrated with Cisco Spark include BitBucket, Jenkins, SonarQube, CheckMarx, Artifactory, and uDeploy. Currently it takes a team about 10 minutes to integrate entire CD toolchain with their Cisco Spark space. The future scope includes integration of requirement gathering tools (like Rally, Jira) and production releases which will give an end-to-end picture from requirement-to-release of a software product.

No longer does a team leader need to wait for status updates from peers working across the globe. One can just see all the activity that has been happening in the Spark room, and can start the meeting talking about the next steps.

Customer Success Story:

Global Service Logistics and Operations IT team (GSLO-IT), which writes the software that supports the movement of $10.6 billion of inventory through 1700 depots each year. Developers work in two U.S. locations, Bangalore, and Jerusalem. “As soon as we wake up, we can see all the communications and toolchain status updates that we missed overnight,” says Yurko, Manager at Cisco IT . “Spark room integration with CD help us keep our scrum teams connected and happy. They also save developers from digging through email to gather information. We’re giving teams the tools and environment they need to be self-directed.”

Advantages:
1. Distributed team collaboration.
2. Work updates for Project managers: The event-based nature of the integration allows for real-time data publish and display from CD platforms.
3. For team leads, it helps tracking a feature or bug-fix right from the inception till it gets released in production.
4. Remedy management: In case of an issue, a ticket can be raised which will create a spark room including adding all relevant people to collaborate to discuss the fix.
5. Provide Immediate feedback/comments if any.